Who would, really? Well, it seems that there is a certain amount of interest from a significant fraction of our customers, for reasons are not really evident. Anyway, since we keep getting questions, here goes:
For the most part our computers are standard brand machines (Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu-Siemens, Lenovo), running Windows XP Professional. (Yes, we definitelyareavoiding Vista, and we intend to wait until Windows 7 has completed its shakedown cruises in one or two years). A few boxes run Linux (Ubuntu) which some of us won’t trade in for any other operating system. No Macs so far, and none intended at this time.
OpenOffice is our standard office suite, and generally we have come to use solid open source software more than we did two years ago. However the E-mail clients are Microsoft Outlook 2003 and 2007 – essentially because we need to sync the smartphones (SonyEricsson and Nokia) and this generally is still too much headache with Thunderbird. Whenever a customer uses encryption for mail traffic (most do not, despite our suggestions to the contrary), e-mail is secured with whatever the customer uses – ideally, with PGP.
Purely web-based collaboration suites are used for some strictly defined non-critical tasks where no client-confidential files of any sort are involved – which means they are used very sparingly. FilesAnywhere is an intelligent remote file storage and management system that beats many comparable systems we have seen, although we keep evaluating.
Our OCR tool is FineReader Pro, one of the preciously few pieces of offices software that is actually programmed to use dualcore CPUs as they should. ChemOffice Pro is what we use to manage chemical information of all stripes. These are two examples where open source solutions are just not adequate yet.